Paul Greenberg

Pulitzer Prize-winning Paul Greenberg, one of the most respected and honored commentators in America, is the editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

An exceptional craftsman, he gives readers an aesthetic as well as political experience and has evoked comparisons to H.L. Mencken and William Allen White. A thoughtful essayist who can also be a devastating critic, Greenberg describes himself as "an ideologically unreliable conservative."

Greenberg won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing and was a Pulitzer finalist in 1978 and 1986. Among his many other honors are the 1988 William Allen White Award, the 1988 Arkansas Associated Press Editorial Writing Award, the 1987 H.L. Mencken Award, the 1983 University of Missouri School of Journalism Medal of Honor, the American Society of Newspaper Editors' 1981 Distinguished Writing Award for Commentary, and the 1964 Grenville Clark Editorial Award. He also won two Walker Stone Awards, in 1985 and 1986.

Greenberg has been on the board of the National Conference of Editorial Writers and served as a Pulitzer jurist in 1984 and 1985. He is the author of the critically acclaimed "Resonant Lives: 50 Figures of Consequence" and "Entirely Personal."

Editorial page editor for the Pine Bluff Commercial in Arkansas from 1962 until 1992 – except for a hiatus as a Chicago Daily News editorial writer in 1966-67 – Greenberg lectures nationwide and regularly provides political analysis on Arkansas network television.

Anyone who criticizes our president's nuclear deal with Iran is bound to be asked: What's the alternative? With the clear implication that there isn't one -- not an acceptable one, anyway. It's either war or peace. A simple, black-and-white, all-or-none choice: It's the president's way or no way -- except war -- to prevent Iran from joining the nuclear club.

There she is, the chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood having lunch at a nice restaurant and, between sips of wine, setting the going rate for various fetal body parts. She's a real pro, this Deborah Nucatola, so competent, so relaxed, so chatty. She betrays about as much emotion as someone putting together the next Neiman Marcus catalogue.

In separate but equally bizarre performances, two presidential candidates showed up in Arkansas last weekend, Hillary Clinton at a Democratic rally in North Little Rock and Donald Trump in Hot Springs, where exotic acts have long been welcomed.

Once upon a time, it was a bedrock American belief that all men are created equal. Now, according to the latest intellectual fashion that governs the art world, all of us are created artists -- and so should feel free to show our work in public, like on the walls of museums. Though if all of us are now artists, no one is, since there's no longer a distinction between artists and the rest of us.

Now it is The Hon. Barack Obama who has run afoul of the Language Police after using the forbidden word in an interview the other day, even if only to warn against its use. "It's not just a matter of it not being polite to say n----- in public," the president opined. Naturally he drew fire from our instant censors, who demanded that he find a way around the unspeakable word if he couldn't drop it entirely.

How little things change -- and how a lot does. It may all depend on leaders -- their quality, their vision, their temperament. The scenes in Greece would be familiar to any American caught in the low ebb of the Depression, like the panicky lines of depositors trying to get what's left of their money out of shuttered banks. It could be the United States in March of 1933 complete with a bank holiday in effect, and all wondering what happens next.

The hopes and fears of all the years met last week in Obergefell v. Hodges, the narrow but sweeping decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that proclaims homosexual couples have a right to marry anywhere in the country. Congratulations to them. At first glance, they've scored a significant victory, even if the score was just 5 to 4.

A great history is both complete and to be continued, like a great house with many wings, door after door opened to the light at last. A great historian not only explores history, but his work makes history.

There he goes again: According to Bill Clinton in an interview with Bloomberg TV, all that criticism of his and Mrs. Clinton's interlocking foundations, aka Clinton Cash, is just a lot of partisan politics because she's running for president

"My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will, every man can follow his own conscience provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow men."
--Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

It is no surprise that there should be so much corruption in politics. Politics is the art of power, and no one ever came way from exercising it with clean hands, however pure his motives or intentions. The man now at the center of this slowly unraveling, never ceasing, always present scandal became speaker of the House himself only because of a series of scandals that culminated in the resignation of a House majority leader who had led the drive to impeach a president -- before his own extra-marital adventures were revealed.